


Forget Your Perfect Offering

by reconditarmonia



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Gen, Genocide, Mourning, Religious Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-10-28 10:41:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20777231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/pseuds/reconditarmonia
Summary: The Ishvalan refugees mourn, and do not mourn, their dead; he prays, and does not pray.





	Forget Your Perfect Offering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Koraki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Koraki/gifts).

Outside of Central City, he hides with a group of refugees who share with him their food and pray by his side. He has not prayed since Ishval, save once, for that little girl, when he felt the hollowness of the prayer the moment it left his mouth. From a murderer, an alchemist, the words were as empty as the desert after the war. He does not deserve to speak to God.

Only words. People like Tucker have taken everything else away; they have taken from themselves the blessings of mourning when they took them from him and all his people. For them there can be no rest in the earth that is God’s.

He does not deserve to speak to God, but God loves to hear God's people’s voices joined together in prayer, and so he prays with them, with these people who know who he is and still count him as their brother. As the prayer concludes, one of them, a woman he thinks is younger than she looks, digs carefully through a cardboard box of clothing that sits against the wall of their lean-to, and takes out a mug, pouring water into it from a half-full pail. She offers it to him, and the meaning of the gesture dawns on him. Something within him shrinks back violently. What use or meaning would there be in the rite here, in pouring water on the unthirsty ground? In Amestris any man can turn his face up to the sky and fill his mouth with rain; it is no diminution of his own life to spill out water for a soul returning to Ishvala.

He sees the woman’s expression grow defensive, defiant. Suddenly he is very conscious of the scrap of striped sash, ragged and stained, pinned to her shoulder. He has seen that expression on another face, in another group, far away. Who is he to look his sister in the eye, play the pious monk, and tell them this is not the proper way — he, who unmakes what God has made? He will not shame their hospitality with righteousness that is not his to claim.

“The whole world is the bosom of Ishvala,” he says, taking the cracked mug from her with as much care as if it were one of the consecrated vessels; he spills a little water onto the ground, murmuring the words, a name, before handing it to the next man.

If he could mourn everyone that he lost, the well in the house of prayer would run dry.

***

"We will mourn them when we return to Ishval," say other Ishvalans that he meets. Some say it in hope; others say it in fierce despair, say it and mean “we will never lay them to rest”. Never in the hostile foreign ground of Amestris, so far from home, though they themselves might be exiled until the end of their days. Never when Amestris has taken everything else from their brothers and sisters and shall not debase this last thing. This is their revenge and their defiance: the Ishvalan dead will not lie quietly.

For him, it is not so. The souls of the unmourned dead do not linger; such a thought is irreligious superstition, stories to frighten children. Only those left in the world carry the dead with them. 

“Our daughter is not dead,” says a man from another village in Kanda. “Please, if you find her, tell her that we ran, and escaped, and we are here. Her fellow-monk told us that he saw her captured by the soldiers, but we know it is not true."

This, too, he must endure.

He has begun praying again. Sometimes it is only himself and Marcoh on the road between settlements, or he is with his brothers and sisters who are not religious, but in the mornings or the evenings he slowly finds he is able to say the prayers and feel them whole. Is this the alchemy that his brother loved, changing the bile that chokes his heart into blood, so that his anger can burn brighter and clearer? He draws his people into a heretical circle across Amestris and bares his arm for Marcoh's needle, and finds that his murderer's tongue can dare to speak to God again.

Marcoh is there when he comes back late to the small room they are sharing, head bent over the alchemy notes, and his heart thuds heavy and painful in his chest. Had it not been for Marcoh, this couple who do not mourn their daughter would have no reason to. He would not have to carry this.

He removes his shoes and socks; the ground is cold under his bare feet, and under his fingertips as he crouches to sit upon the earth. Marcoh averts his eyes, and begins to collect up his papers, and his mittens from where they sit beside his work.

“Stop,” he says. 

Marcoh looks up, and waits.

He clears his throat. “It’s cold outside. You can stay.”

Marcoh lays his notes back on the table, and for a while there is no sound in the room but the sound of words of prayer, the rustle of pages and scratch of a pen that stop in the moments when Marcoh looks up to watch him, and their slow, quiet breaths in the still air.

***

First they buried the bodies, or what remained of them. Amestrian soldiers and military engineers, who came expecting to build roads and railroads, cleared and carted away the rubble, worked side by side with his brothers and sisters to dig graves with military-issue shovels and then stood aside while they buried those they found. A graveyard has a cenotaph, now, with all the names of people and families that anyone can remember having lived in the village. There are gaps, they know, and the graves themselves have stones with only prayers at the heads, because it has been eight years, and because everyone who knew most of these people is also lying dead somewhere in this ground. A great deal of water is spilled into the sand and dust of these fields, and of the places where their brothers and sisters died.

Even after all this, even knowing that to be mourned is not to be gone but to be in the land with him and with God, he falters when he thinks of it, even after waiting so long. After holding them so long, he cannot yet. Instead, he throws his body into the work of rebuilding Ishval, his back and his hands. He stands by other mourners, and swallows the old fear and hatred at the sight of the Amestrian soldiers in their land. He builds, and prays, and works in the hospitals, and does not return to the place where his village used to be.

Here, in one of the villages with enough survivors to rebuild, they dig a new well. The old house of prayer with its well was left in ruins, artillery and alchemy leaving nothing higher than a knee, and it must be Ishvalans who do this, so Miles dispatches his subordinates and their machinery to other rebuilding efforts, strips off his uniform coat, and picks up a shovel to dig with the rest of them. Miles has said that he will mourn his friend Buccaneer when he returns to the north.

He visits the well after sunset one night, once it has been consecrated by a brother who is still a monk. The vessels have been brought from elsewhere until this village has its own again. He sits to pray on the still-warm earth, amid the newly laid foundations of the house of prayer still open to the sky, and when he is done, he takes water from the well and spills a little out for _Uri and Sarah Rockbell_. And again: _Nina Tucker_. Then, _Shou Tucker. Basque Grand. King Bradley_… He tilts the vessel to the ground, and lets them slip away.

**Author's Note:**

> point: titles from this song are overdone  
counterpoint: this song is about Scar though
> 
> Happy Equivalent Exchange, and shana tova.


End file.
